Majority Rule

How reforming the filibuster could pave the way to climate legislation, education funding, and health care reform.

Former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond during his record-setting 1957 filibuster on the Senate floor. He spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful effort to block the Civil Rights Act.

An extraordinary story of the public coming together during hard times? Not really.

Instead, it’s a story of a successful game changer. In 2007,
Washington amended its state constitution to eliminate the
supermajority requirement for approval of school levies. A simple
majority of voters—50 percent plus one—can now approve education
funding.

Consequently, an additional 66 levies worth $1.7 billion to schools passed in February elections. According to a League of Education Voters tally, that’s how many levies garnered at least 50 percent of votes but less than 60 percent.

What’s more, school districts emboldened by the simple-majority
threshold may have increased the sums they proposed to voters, meaning
that $1.7 billion may be an understatement of the benefit to schools.
And, of course, the simple-majority rule is now enshrined in the
constitution and will continue bringing deeper investments in education
for years to come. One rule change in favor of majority rule: tens of
billions of dollars of investment in public education.

Would that the U.S. Senate operated on the principle of majority rule!

Oh, wait. It does. The U.S. Constitution says so.

The 60-vote supermajority in Senate procedures is required to stop
debate, not to pass a law.

There's a new method for choosing Best Picture this year: instant
runoff voting, a system that would also make political elections more
fair.

What merits underlining here is simply that, were it not for the Senate’s undemocratic, historically accidental, and self-imposed 60 percent filibuster rule, the United States would probably already have a climate and energy law similar to the bill that passed the House in June.
If it did, Canada might be close behind, and the Copenhagen climate
negotiations might have gone much better. The U.S. would already
be much further down the road to a clean-energy revolution, a price on carbon emissions, and a green-jobs recovery.
(And that’s to say nothing of U.S. health care reform, banking reform,
immigration reform, and a dozen other public priorities that are
essential to our future.)

Sixty or fifty. Much of our future depends on these numbers. To win
for our children the secure, prosperous, sustainable way of life they
deserve, we ought to heed the lesson of the school levies and pay more
attention to the rules of governance. We ought to look for
game-changing reforms that will make democracy work better.

Alan Durning is the founder and executive director of the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit research and communication center that promotes a sustainable economy and way of life in the Pacific Northwest.